Andy Wilson’s call to “end eDiscovery” as we know it is not just a clever bit of guerilla marketing. His slings and arrows of outrageous fortune justly criticizes the stubborn immaturity of eDiscovery buyers compounded by the $/GB avarice from vendors. Been there, wrote that blog a few times. It is good stuff and good fun. Outdated approaches and purchasing models do drive up costs. I think that he missed one of the key causes to this ‘stain’ on our industry. Babies and puppies make messes because they do not know better. Immature eDiscovery buyers are frequently isolated by the adversarial and confidential nature of our art. So called educational webinars and other free resources are almost entirely created by marketing departments to support those same high margin offerings that we are criticizing. We need to break down the walls of self-censorship. Why can’t we publish pricing? Why do vendors refuse or ignore RFI/RFP forms that force them into clear apple to apple comparisons? Besides the usual update lag, why are there only 53 out of 886 offerings in my eDJ Matrix that have published pricing? We cannot expect providers to go against their own self interest, especially those with shareholders or investors to placate. So it is up to buyers to break down the barriers and help the entire industry become smart, mature practitioners.

Just as I was lamenting the shrinking field of Matter Management offerings suitable for enterprise level customers, the founders/execs of iManage announced that they have extracted their product from Autonomy-HP borg. I hope that the developers did not drink the IDOL Kool-Aid and are able to revert the database/index/analytics back to something practical for customers to deploy. This on the same day as U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer approved a $100 million settlement between a Dutch pension fund and HP over the Autonomy acquisition. Catch the Courthouse News Service article title, “Pensioners Get $100M for HP’s Takeover Flop”. Nice juicy terms such as “disasterous $10.3 billion purchase of Autonomy Corp.”, “botched acquisition” and “blamed former Autonomy executives for misrepresenting its revenue”. Fun.

Matter management platforms that are suitable for large enterprise customers are not as common as a simple Google search or general software purchasing site would lead you to believe. There are LOTS of home grown Saas offerings suitable for solo or small firms, but very few with mature, customizable workflow actually designed for corporate legal departments managing hundreds or thousands of legal matters. When Mitratech announced that their acquisition of Bridgeway would benefit these enterprise customers, I immediately wanted to see how many viable competitors were left in the market, which is not as easy as that sounds. I created a matter management category in our eDJ Matrix that found 9 solutions, but experience tells me that our categories require some research to tune and nudge the providers to update their listings. My quick impression is that one of the leaders in enterprise legal management (ELM) just absorbed another primary competitor. That leaves providers with broader offering suites such as Thomson Reuters, HP, Exterro and IBM. eDJ’s clients now have fewer options for matter management functionality without all the baggage.

The ‘TAR Wars’ have argued incessantly over the different approaches to training the analytic engine to extract the 1-3% of relevant items from your raw collections. Proponents of true random sampling (Herb Roitblat of Orcatec) have criticized ‘Active’ sampling based on user provided seed documents because the active approach might miss unanticipated concepts or documents. In other words, some approaches are great at finding what you already know about, while others might find relevant documents that you never even considered and eliminate potential reviewer bias. Given the selective recall of many corporate custodians, diligent counsel will want to know the good and the bad before trying to settle a matter. Savvy counsel, providers and consultants have used multiple approaches in the primary review and QC stages to optimize recall while tackling ever larger collections. The conceptual navigation approach starts with a visualization or inventory of conceptual clusters to let the collection ‘speak’ for itself. Brainspace, Tunnelvision and other platforms have advocated this top down conceptual navigation to know what you have before you start training your relevance model. Catalyst has coined the term ‘Contextual Diversity Sampling’ to describe their system to find topics that reviewers might have missed in the Continuous Active Learning process. There are all kinds of jokes about how diversity can make us all PC. Call it what you want, I am pleased to see more mature, practical analytic workflows hitting the market. We all know that manual linear review of 100% of collections is neither accurate nor practical in the face of the corporate data hoarding juggernauts. So we need review solutions that even conservative counsel will get behind to tame skyrocketing discovery budgets. Keep asking hard questions and sending me feedback on both hype and success.

You have heard my skepticism and concern about marketers in educational clothing. It is a nice change to call your attention to some solid reference material on eDiscovery developed for a formal, traditional law school program. Michael Arkfeld’s 3rd Edition now exceeds 1,700 pages (available in CD or through LexisNexis online). eDiscovery is a relatively young discipline and most courses, white papers or other resource materials are out of date before they are even published. Michael’s long term perspective tempers the usual overstatements made in the rush to ‘best practice’. His core reference book and four supplementary practice guides are a worthwhile investment for new practitioners and departments. Yes, Michael graciously sent me the latest release to review, but he took his chances on my somewhat acerbic feedback just like technology vendors who send me software to break. I could not find any discussion of the 2015 FRCP Amendments that will take effect at the end of the year, but we never really know how those will play out until argued before the bench anyway. As much as I shy away from spending educational budget on what are effectively ‘mail order certificates’, I will continue to recommend Arkfeld’s material to my corporate and law firm clients to help new personnel up to speed.

Information governance (IG) is one of those things that every company talks about, most companies know they should do, but very few actually follow through with. IG, quite simply, is records retention and destruction, both of those tasks occurring according to an established protocol and schedule, and preferably with a minimum of subjective human interaction. And, of course, you can't govern your information if you don't know where all of it is, so IG presumes that the enterprise has control of its data as well.

Bigger than life. That was Jack. The big guy lost his battle against cancer this morning and the eDiscovery world is a smaller, darker place. Others can rightly expound on his contributions to our rather esoteric calling as a leader at Guidance, Autonomy/HP and most recently Google. Right now I just miss my friend. He never let go of that irrepressible intensity, irreverence and honesty that we all brought to our first job. If you are up to it, raise Jack’s favorite Jägermeister shot in remembrance.

Stephen E. Arnold caught this early (2007) Palantir blog entry attempting to explain what Palantir does (or did from a systems engineer’s perspective) to interview candidates. Although this is incredibly dated, the explanation of the functional components of ‘analysis’ and the human role in them still has merit in light of our eDiscovery relevance challenge. Worth a fast read. Here is my extracted interpretations:
Three core disciplines for large data set analysis:

With all the VC money flowing into the eDiscovery market right now, why are providers, companies and firms cutting experienced practitioners? The combination of a large professional network, accessibility and independence puts me high on many people’s call list when they land on the Reduction In Force (RIF) list. The last month has had my Inbox bombarded with a wave of long term friends hitting the job market at the same time as I am seeing $400+ million in investor capital injected into our market. I get the energy company legal departments downsizing to show theoretical savings, even when I bet that they are spending MORE on outside services from case budgets to cover the lost headcount. I do not mind the time to mentor, make connections and review resumes. Others have helped me when I made my many transitions between law enforcement, law firm, provider, corporate, analyst and back to consultant. We should all remember those who found even one opportunity when it counted and pay it forward. As for the eDiscovery market, I believe we are experiencing a long delayed maturity catharsis in providers and consumers. Firm partners and corporate counsel have demonstrated a remarkable recalcitrance in the face of new methods, technologies and billing models. Many have clung to treating ESI review like 1980’s paper discovery. While outside investors see the maturation of eDiscovery as proof that it is time to get in the game, adaption to a mature, efficient business process requires massive reorganization for both providers and their clients. That puts good professionals on the street looking for their next employer. If you have found yourself suddenly unemployed, use that free time to catch up on market and send me a blog. I am happy to publish it and get your name out there IF it is genuine, relevant and entertaining – like I try to be. And if you are looking for an experienced eDiscovery professional who has worked with me at some point in my 25+ year journey, shoot me the job description. eDJ is not a placement agency and I don’t give recommendations/connections to folks unless I have worked with them.

As my 2014 analytics research demonstrated, analytics has become a marketing buzz word like ‘smart’, ‘intelligent’ or ‘predictive’ to imply new technology to make something easier or better. Press releases like “Mitratech Launches Certified Legal Analytics Partner Program; HBR Consulting Earns First Certification” make me ask hard questions like: “What does this actually mean?” – “What is legal analytics in Mitratech speak?” – “What does certification mean to customer? Guarantees? Standards?” I think you get the idea. My take after digging through the release and Mitratech’s public material is that Mitratech has a consulting partnership with HBR to help customers use their dashboard and reports. I get this and frankly Mikki and I do a lot of similar technology enablement projects following up on solution design and RFP engagements. Good for Mitratech, HBR and their customers. But it is not ‘Certified Legal Analytics’ in my book (based on public materials). Everyone wants to work smarter and needs analytic tools to visualize relationships, trends, clusters, differentials, averages, etc. Providers will insist that dynamic reports and dashboards featuring charts and graphs check this functional box. Maybe they are right. But we have checked that same box using Excel, Access and customer SQL apps for decades. Show me something new.

Palantir has been on my radar for a couple years after spending an hour at their LTNY booth. They have neat toys and a much higher level of sophistication regarding the practical applications of their visualizations and analytics than most start-ups. They throw around customer success stories from well known pharma and financial names along with ‘un-named’ government agencies. Their market valuations have shot through the roof since 2009, hitting $9B (yep, BILLION) at the end of 2013, $15B at the end of 2014 and now $20B in just seven months. If they are that successful, why are they still taking rounds of funding? If they want to play in the eDiscovery space, why not just buy up key IP from small players and produce a COTS eDiscovery platform that actually works in a large enterprise environment with their petty cash? The hype and tech mystique around Palantir remind me of Autonomy in their hayday. My only hope is that all those “failure is not an option” secret customers provide the Palantir team the motivation and funding to actually deliver on all the eye candy. The market has been hungry for a practical analytic platform that can tackle the diversity and scale of today’s corporate ESI.

Australian Vound software is offering a version of their Intella ECA/investigation tool with a 10 GB/case volume cap for $99. If their Solution Comparison Chart feels a bit redundant, it is. The only real difference that I could see in versions is about whether it is a solo desktop or a shared discovery platform with multiuser access. All the other versions are just volume caps and packages. So what does Intella do? Process, search and investigative review of collected ESI. Sounds a lot like where Nuix started out, an Australian forensic tool built for volume and speed. Maybe my friend Craig Ball spotted other up-and-coming Australian eDiscovery tools suitable for his EDna Challenge while he was down there recently. In the US market, we seem to have lost affordable desktop ECA tools in favor of enterprise class processing platforms with hefty price tags. The low entry Ipro Eclipse SE offer took me back to the old Summation iBlaze suite that allowed my clients to run small matters without a dongle or having to worry about billing back $/GB charges. The big boys may have the marketing money to buy their way into an analyst’s mystical diagram, but more nimble players are starting to bring right sized solutions to the SMB market for affordable and reasonable eDiscovery functionality. Keep’em coming and I will keep telling it as I see it.

kCura’s Relativity has dominated the hosted review market. But when EVERYONE has Relativity, how can service providers differentiate themselves beyond the race to the lowest $/GB? Think back just a couple years to when Clearwell seemed to own the channel market. Clearwell seized the consumer brand recognition and national service providers quickly had certified Clearwell PMs running searches and supporting small reviews. kCura captured that same brand recognition with a new level of scalability and review usability that gave legal process outsourcing (LPO) providers like DTI a non-proprietary platform to host large, multi-party reviews. DTI has invested heavily in Relativity (creating a custom redaction tool and being a Relativity Best in Service Orange partner). I am sure that DTI is not walking away from that investment and all those hosted cases. However, DTI is expanding their ipro partnership to offer PC/TAR review hosted on ipro Eclipse. Why would DTI offer TWO review platforms with CAAT powered TAR? I am guessing that ipro’s ‘all in’ pricing and new workflow automation are a strong motivation. Customers are tired of the analytic sticker shock (and yes, I am still seeing $200/GB fees for CAAT analytics). They want predictable costs and ‘one click’ processing. It will be interesting to watch the other big national players to see if they too expand their review platform options.

Many market analysts covering enterprise search, archiving or other Info Gov technologies may have mixed feelings about search specialist Stephen E. Arnold and his completely unfiltered blog, Beyond Search. Mr. Arnold seems to have a positive disdain for the products and opinions published by what he calls the ‘azure chip’ consulting-analyst firms. Luckily for eDJ Group, we were too young and focused on the eDiscovery market segment during our tilt at those same institutional windmills to attract his attention and frequently caustic commentary with our research reports and perspective. Secretly, I always admired his style, even when I did not agree with Mr. Arnold’s conclusions. His blog rehashing Gartner’s 2014 “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Search” is positively peppered with pithy counterpoints and observations. Retroactive criticism of a firm’s mystical square or wave is kind of like watching early reruns of the Daily Show, amusing but dated and out of context. These ranking visualizations are a good indicator of the competitors who have the funds and/or maturity to pay for a sufficient block of ‘analyst days’ to market their tailored messages to the captive analysts. Dig through the suits by ZL Technologies or NetScout for fun background. In the end, analysts publish opinions and I still believe that they are entitled to them, however arbitrary or biased they may be. It is the consumers’ responsibility to winnow the wheat from the chaff. I hope that you enjoy Mr. Arnold’s blog as much as I did. His unfiltered perspective helps remind me why we left the ‘market analyst’ field to resume full time consulting.

If you are a legacy Summation iBlaze, LAW or even more esoteric desktop processing user, you should check out ipro’s limited time offer for 50% off of your first copy of their new Eclipse SE. The word on the street had a single user annual subscription starting around $750, so this offer brings it low enough for most to just expense it. As always, I am not a paid marketer and I have not done any analyst days for ipro since we shut down the market analyst group early last year. I just know that there are a LOT of old Summation iBlaze customers out there looking for a replacement and this might meet your requirements. Have fun and let me know how it works for you!

Not sure if you heard about all the rain and flooding down here in Houston, but that is just one reason for my recent hiatus from blogging. Once life takes you away from your routine, it is hard to get back in the saddle, but press releases like this one from OLP give me all the incentive I need to write. Now you know that I hate to pick on any one vendor when my real concern is a broader trend that I want to call your attention to. In this case, it is the way that some for-profit providers effectively cloak their true nature and revenue source by presenting themselves as ‘organizations’, ‘associations’, ‘reference models’, ‘institutes’ or other labels intended to convey academic authority. eDiscovery is such a young and cross-functional discipline that many new practitioners indiscriminately consume ‘best practices’, certificates and purchasing guidance without understanding how the source of that self-proclaimed authority makes money. I happily include myself in that ‘self-proclaimed’ group, because in my opinion there were and are no classic non-profit or academic standards bodies out there to grant anyone eDiscovery authority. Others can and will disagree with me, but all I am asking you is to ask the question, “Show me the money!” before you allocate educational time or budget.

Downsizing eDJ from a market analyst firm back to boutique strategic consulting pretty much took Mikki and I off the speaker’s circuit for 2014. So besides escorting key clients through the LTNY maze back in March, this has been my longest hiatus from conferences in a long time. At last week’s Ipro Innovations event, I did a short 20 minute session on who is moving to the Cloud on the main stage and then a fun session on my key 2015 eDiscovery trends. Both slide decks have been uploaded to the eDJ Group site for members who have taken a survey in the last 30 days.

For the last several years, eDJ has conducted surveys that confirmed the accelerating trend of companies moving their messaging, collaboration and other IG systems to the Cloud. This year I am interested in whether consumers are starting to actually conduct discovery in the Cloud as well. My ongoing eDJ poll ‘Where do you conduct eDiscovery’ has yet to turn up anyone who ‘knows’ that their eDiscovery is being conducted in the public Cloud out of the 16 respondents so far. I know that many popular hosted platforms and well known channel providers use the public Cloud (Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, etc) for secured servers and storage. This makes me wonder if most customers are either not asking the right questions or if savvy providers have figured out ways to ‘rebrand’ the public Cloud with ‘private instances’. Sounds like I need to add some new features and categories to the eDJ Matrix to separate the apples from oranges.

We had a customer question on whether they should/could disable read receipts in corporate email. There was little business value in their vertical for active use of read receipts (i.e. they did not have a large sales division) and a smart attorney on the stakeholder team thought that they posed more risk than reward. Doug Austin’s blog about Fox v. Leland Volunteer Fire/Rescue Department Inc. is a good read on the potential risks of ‘automatically authenticating’ the fact that a custodian saw a specific message, even if I can think of a dozen scenarios where read receipts falsely report custodian awareness. Shutting down read receipt functionality on Exchange or Office 365 is a simple Powershell Cmdlet:

Something occurred to me while working on my upcoming Ipro Innovations session on ‘Who’s Making the Jump to the Cloud & Why?’ The fundamental role of IT was to create and maintain the dynamic technology infrastructure that supported the applications, connectivity and storage required by the business users. Over time, simple server-client applications evolved into customized enterprise platfoms that made strong IT department essential for competitive corporations and firms. Long standing virtualization and centralized storage trends have made these enterprise platforms relatively hardware agnostic, a key requirement for migration to a public Cloud environment. Now that CIO’s everywhere seem to be sending pilot balloons into the Cloud, is there a role for the traditional IT administrator? Many traditional processing/hosting service providers are asking the same question about their future role in the eDiscovery lifecycle. Are they needed when the ESI is created, collected, processed, reviewed and produced in the Cloud? Because that is the direction that companies small and large seem to be headed. It will be a couple years before Microsoft is giving away fully integrated Equivio Zoom functionality to all Office 365 customers, but sharp providers and IT should be looking at that road map and redefining their own roles if they want to stay relevant and employed. I will share some high points from my session or you can participate in person if you happen to be in Phoenix next week. Meanwhile, here is a fun graphic from my deck.